At a time when legal efforts, at least in California, are being made to curb circumcisions (and some of the rhetoric may have even turned anti-Semitic), it’s worth looking at what, if anything, the centuries-old artistic tradition of representing circumcision can bring to the conversation.

After reviewing several hundred paintings, drawings and prints, it’s pretty clear that there is no way around the fact that 99 percent of the circumcision representations amount to a similarly choreographed scene — several adults — often bearded men — hunched over a very helpless infant, usually Jesus.

According to Steinberg, Renaissance art refused to acknowledge the visual effects of circumcision, and Renaissance scholarship “evaded” the problem. Steinberg dismissed the argument that Renaissance artists might not have known what a circumcised man would look like, because “in 15th-century Italy Muslim slaves of both sexes were near ubiquitous.”

Instead, Steinberg allowed that artists may have viewed circumcision as a type of mutilation.

“Depicting the nude infant Christ at whatever age, they willingly paid the price of inaccuracy to spare the revered body the blemish of imperfection,” he wrote. “But then they were no less ‘inaccurate’ when they showed the body nailed to the cross without the welts and stripes incurred at the recent scourging.”

Steinberg noted that Jesus’ foreskin was a relic as well (which was “owned competitively by several churches”), though some argued it would have been resurrected with him.

“The reason for the Child’s apparent uncircumcision must lie in the artists’ sense of the body’s perfection,” he wrote. “Here they would not infringe, any more than they would deprive Eve of a navel, no matter what the learned might say.”

Jewish traditions responded to foreskins (and relics) differently, but there’s still no getting around the inequality of scale in circumcisions. The adults are large and powerful, and the infant is wholly at their mercy.

A Rembrandt etching and drypoint in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, even departs from artistic conventions by showing a crying, terrified baby, rather than a stoic one.

I intend to remain officially agnostic on the question of whether circumcision ought to be legal or whether it is a best religious or life practice. But one wonders to what extent, if at all, those who are publicly calling for it to be banned have experienced religious circumcision ceremonies, and how much their views of circumcision have been shaped by those ceremonies or visual traditions of depicting circumcisions.